If It Were the United States of Little Wasp

Today in New York and then in Florence begin the solemn celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the death of Amerigo Vespucci. In particular, an exhibit is unveiled in New York today: “Amerigo’s America – Florence and the merchants of the New World”.

And I, since I was a young boy, have asked myself a terrible question: What would the world have been like if America had taken not the first name but the surname of the Florentine navigator?

Think about it, the United States of Little Wasp. Would a country dedicated to the diminutive name of an insect ever have become a global superpower? Would it ever have conquered the earth and the moon and colonized the customs of the planet? Who would have been afraid of little wasps? How would the waspian way of life have been able to command the world? Little wasps would not have suffered from gigantism, as instead do the Americans, and not even from obesity, but from nanoism, in fact more so from insectism. It would have passed unobserved or considered bothersome at the most.

Their flag would be of yellow stripes on a black background, because as the encyclopedias explain, “Wasps have yellow stripes on a brown body” (hence Bruno Vespa). Their buzz would not have had global resonance; a good insecticide would have sufficed to keep them far away from Europe, and the redskins would still be the lords of their land. In dictionaries, they would not have been present on the first few pages, as their lavish name America obliges, but relegated to the back, between Vespasiano, the pioneer of the toilet, and Vispa Teresa, butterfly hunter. Ah, the power of a name…